INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF APPLIED LINGUISTICSS,QUARING No.

C2,IRCLES
Vol. 13, THE 2003 159

Squaring the circles:

issues in modeling English worldwide

PAUL BRUTHIAUX
Texas A&M University

The model originally promoted by Braj Kachru and representing

English worldwide as Inner, Outer, and Expanding circles has helped
valorize denigrated varieties by drawing attention to commonalities
across old and new varieties and by altering perceptions of their com-
municative potential and relative prestige. However, the model suf-
fers from being based in a political/historical view of English worldwide
and thus fails to capture transplantations of the language in locations
not formally recorded by colonial history. Because it promotes specic
varieties, the model also ignores variation within locales, especially
where the gap between those who know English and those who do not
is vast. Overall, the model encourages broad-brush descriptions of
manifestations of English across all three circles that do not stand up
to sociolinguistic analysis. In response, it is suggested that the model
can continue to serve as a shorthand for English worldwide but that it
must adapt by (1) moving away from a focus on nation-states in favor
of a sociolinguistic focus on English-speaking communities wherever
they are found and (2) recognizing that fundamental differences across
contexts for English worldwide cannot be glossed over in support of
specic varieties if we are to arrive at descriptively adequate sociolin-
guistics and socially relevant language policies.

Introduction

For the best part of the last two decades, commentators on English worldwide
have taken as their theoretical premise the model consisting of three concentric
circles originally proposed by Braj Kachru (1984, 1985, 1989). In this model, the
Inner Circle comprises locations where English is the language of a substantial,
often monolingual majority (e.g. USA, UK, Ireland, Australia, etc.). A major
characteristic of varieties spoken in these locations is that they are largely

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160 PAUL BRUTHIAUX

endonormative, that is, they nd within themselves the norms of correctness and
appropriateness to be propagated through language education and language
planning. By contrast, the Outer Circle represents locations that typically
came under British or American colonial administration before acceding to
independence and where English continues to be used for interethnic communica-
tion and as a dominant language by those at the top of the socioeconomic ladder.
These English-speaking or at least English-knowing communities range in size
and geopolitical importance from India to Nauru through Nigeria, Kenya, the
Philippines, Singapore, Fiji, and many more. Post-colonial New Englishes tend
to generate ambivalence among commentators. While some stress the role played
by these varieties in perpetuating socioeconomic divisions between those who
have English and those who do not (e.g. Canagarajah 1999; Ramanathan 1999),
others emphasize the way in which they encapsulate aspirations to modernity
through participation in worldwide trade, access to technology, and the tying
together of new and typically multilingual nations (e.g. Kanyoro 1991). Despite
increasing linguistic self-reliance and a gradual shift from exonormative to
endonormative attitudes (Banjo 2000), these Englishes continue to be affected
by conict between linguistic norms and linguistic behavior, with widespread
perceptions among users that Anglo-American norms are somehow superior
and that their own variants are therefore decient. The Expanding Circle,
meanwhile, represents societies where English is not passed on to infants natural-
istically across generations but is taught in schools to an increasing number of
learners and is used by some, at least in activities involving members of
other linguistic local communities and in international trade or tourism. Given
that English it can be safely assumed is now taught to someone somewhere in
every nation on earth, the Expanding Circle presumably comprises every nation
not included in the Inner or Outer circles. Randomly selected names include
Brazil, Italy, Thailand, Morocco, and many more. In these locations, English
tends to be exonormative in that speakers, educators, and policy-makers have
traditionally looked to American or British models for linguistic norms.
Judging by the number of scholarly sources in which reference is made to
the Three Circles of English, the model has clearly had a major impact.
Introduced at a time when the duopoly of American and British English was
unquestioned and metropolitan attitudes to postcolonial variants often ranged
from amused condescension to racist stereotyping (for reviews, see de Beaugrande
1999; Canagarajah 1999; Bhatt 2002), the model broke new ground in raising
awareness of the very existence of dynamic varieties of English with growing
populations of speakers and increasingly vibrant media, literatures, and popular
cultures. Startling though it may have seemed to many at the time, the very act
of pluralizing English and encouraging serious debate regarding the nature
and role of New Englishes denoted both imagination and courage. Indeed,
the enterprise was far from innocent. In Kachrus own words (reported in
Prendergast 1998: 229), this terminological choice constituted nothing short of
an insurgent linguistic weapon. Though potentially a double-edged sword,
the characterization of the enterprise as liberation linguistics (Kachru 1991),

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 SQUARING THE CIRCLES 161

a label that evolved in response to Quirks 1990 concern with over-politicization)

was apt.
Over time, the model has enabled a generation of analysts to explore
changing sociolinguistic circumstances and to capture evolving relationships
across varieties (for a historical survey of this process, see Leitner 1992) as well
as between language and power. The model has played a signicant role in
valorizing non-metropolitan varieties of English and in encouraging perceptions
of these varieties as the default code for increasing numbers of speakers, the
object of serious scholarly investigation, and the uncontroversial vehicle for
best-selling literature (Thumboo 2001; Talib 2002). One direct outcome of this
perceptual shift has been the increasing number of recommendations that the
teaching of English be made to reect local identities and incorporate local as
well as worldwide norms (among recent examples, see Pakir 1999; Eguiguren
2000; Kubota 2001; Bhatt 2001). Typical of this shift is the claim by Arua and
Magocha (2000) that the variety of English now taking root among Botswana
children meets all the criteria for a communicatively adequate code, is not
perceived as inferior to other varieties, is comprehensible internationally, and
is of a quality such that there is no reason why it should not be used for
educational purposes.
Yet, despite its evident merits and the contributions it has undoubtedly
made to our appreciation of the modern sociolinguistic context of English world-
wide, the Three Circles model is not without limitations. In this article, I review
some of the major reasons why the model may no longer be appropriate for this
evolving context. I argue that because it is descriptively and analytically incon-
sistent as well as over-representative of a political agenda, the model has little
explanatory power and makes only a minor contribution to making sense of the
current conguration of English worldwide. In essence, the model suffers from
the legacy of past successes. While the promotion of denigrated varieties was a
just and timely objective, this concentration has left us with a primarily nation-
based model which draws on specic historical events and which correlates
poorly with current sociolinguistic data. Because it tries to account for varieties
(in the Inner Circle), a multiplicity of speaker types (mainly in the Outer
Circle), and geographical locations (in the Expanding Circle) all at once, this
supercially appealing and convenient model conceals more than it reveals and
runs the risk of being interpreted as license to dispense with analytical rigor.
On balance, I suggest, the Three Circles model is a 20th century construct that
has outlived its usefulness, and I will briey sketch out at the end of this article
a 21st century alternative that focuses instead on the specic sociolinguistic
characteristics of English-speaking communities wherever they are found.

Limitations of the model: the Inner Circle

Curiously, perhaps, given the self-declared intention by promoters of the model

to be subversive, the model reinforces perceptions of Inner Circle varieties of

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162 PAUL BRUTHIAUX

English as largely monolithic and standardized because it offers no account of

dialectal variation within each of the varieties that it lists. This is especially
true of African-American English, as the recent Ebonics controversy amply
illustrates. As Lippi-Green (1997) and Collins (1999) show, the debate may have
raged over whether or not Black English was to be regarded as a dialect or a
language. However, the two sides were in agreement throughout in their view
that Standard English and Black English do not simply constitute minor variants
of one variety. Though generally less controversial, the same debate has marked
perceptions of what might constitute British English given that the variety con-
tinues to be characterized by substantial dialectal divergence. As Millar puts it
in Afendras et al. (1995: 299), British English is not so much a cover term as
a masking term: it hides major phonetic and phonological variation and renders
invisible very many speakers and several national identities.
By glossing over this variation, the model inadvertently contributes to
perpetuating the notion that despite the variety traditionally referred to as
Received Pronunciation (RP) being spoken by a tiny minority of British users,
this single, supposedly homogenous and norm-giving variety should remain the
preferred model for speakers who for historical or personal reasons tend to
relate to British linguistic norms. In large measure this is due to the fact that
discussions of standards within the Three Circles model as elsewhere rarely
take into account the fundamental difference between spoken norms, spontan-
eously shared by communities of speakers and hence not easily amenable to
deliberate standardization, and written norms, which are relatively open to
manipulation by institutional forces, especially through schooling. By ignoring
the fact that written norms differ relatively little whereas spoken norms differ
widely across Englishes old or new, the model misses an opportunity to encourage
rigorous analysis of commonalities and differences across varieties of English.
In short, by oversimplifying in this manner, the model offers an incomplete and
potentially misleading representation of one of its major components.
A second limitation of the model is that it fails to account for varieties that
meet conventional Inner Circle criteria except for the fact that they are spoken
by a minority, often alongside evolving varieties taking root among neighboring
communities in the country. Typical of this context is South Africa, a nation
where English fullls a nationwide range of functions including that of lingua
franca, dominant medium of education, and symbol of political change and
modernization. In a multicultural and multilingual country of such complexity,
at least three major varieties of English operate with distinct social and functional
distributions. One of these, which could be described as White South African
English, is a recent transplant, in many ways comparable to Australian or New
Zealand English in their respective settings. Another, widely identied as Black
South African English, represents an emerging variety not yet securely estab-
lished but possibly evolving toward a competing standard of increasing prestige
and power (van der Walt and van Rooy 2002). A third, labeled by Mesthrie
(1996) South African Indian English, has its origins in the efforts of a migrant
population speaking a range of North and South Indian languages to communicate

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with English and Zulu speakers without having signicant competence in either
language, at least initially. The result is a variety that is distinct from both White
and Black South African Englishes as well as from mainland Indian varieties
because it was inuenced by a specic set of social conditions, namely prolonged
interactions with native and non-native speakers and teachers of English (often
other Indians) in South Africa. Overall, as de Kadt (2000) argues, South Africa
ts neither the Inner nor the Outer components of the model.
One response to this conundrum has been to focus on the relatively stable
White variety of South African English and to list it alongside less problematic
Inner Circle varieties, an approach followed by Graddol (1997: 10). The other
is simply to omit all reference to South African English in relation to Inner
Circle varieties, as does Yano (2001). Clearly, listing White and Black South
African Englishes as part of the Inner and Outer circles respectively would be
politically divisive. Yet, even if we accept the characterization of Black South
African English as rapidly evolving and therefore not amenable to classica-
tion, there is a case for identifying a White South African variety of English on
the same basis as, say, an Australian or even an American variety in that these
are spoken natively by most descendants of European immigrants and the
descendants of other, more recent immigrants who adopted those speech norms.
On this basis, especially once comparable populations in neighboring countries
such as Zimbabwe or Namibia are taken into account, the total number of
speakers of what might be labeled White Southern African English is probably
greater (approximately 4 5 million) than the entire English-speaking populations
of Ireland or New Zealand. On demographic grounds alone, this makes leaving
this population and the variety of English it sustains out of the Inner Circle
untenable. On theoretical grounds, there is a case for questioning the validity of
a model that stresses the common nature of varieties of English descended from
a colonial power that exported its language and saw it gain additional speakers
in at least ve locations (Ireland, USA, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand)
while leaving out an obvious candidate on the grounds of political sensibilities
or simply poor t with other varieties within the nation-state in question. In
effect, the very reliance of the model on nation-states as its principal conceptual
base is called into question.

Limitations of the model: the Outer Circle

THE OUTER CIRCLE AND (NON-)NATIVENESS

While it is legitimate for a model of English worldwide to encourage a sense
of increasing ownership of English among its many users, it must also address
the complexities arising from multilingual settings in which an increasing number
of these users operate. These complexities include the nature and scope of
(non-)nativeness, whether and how these can be determined, and whether they
matter. In practice, the Three Circles model appears to have muddied the waters
by idealizing the very distinction between native and non-native speakers that it

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set out to counteract. At a relatively trivial level, this is apparent in some of the
odder attempts at grouping countries on the basis of the native or non-native
competence of their populations. Graddol (1997), for example, lists two nations
with largely bi-ethnic populations born of the earlier practice of importing
Indian laborers: Fiji, and Trinidad and Tobago. Yet, while Trinidad and Tobago
is listed alongside India and others as having both native and non-native
populations of English speakers, Fiji is not, despite the fact that its Indian
population (still numbering close to 50% of the total) displays a similar con-
tinuum from English-dominant bilinguals to those with little or no knowledge of
English, and every shade in between (Siegel 1992).
At the root of this lack of typological systematicity is a sense of ambiguity
encouraged by the model. Clearly, there is a crucial sociolinguistic difference
between what languages users know and what they do with what they know. Put
another way, the language needs of adults do not necessarily require that they
possess native or native-like competence across the entire system. However, this
purely instrumental perspective bypasses the psycholinguistic underpinnings
of multilingual competence. In practice, it should be uncontroversial to note
that locations of the Outer type are characterized by a vast spread between
those who know and use English in preference to any other language in their
repertoire and those who know or use no English whatsoever. Unlike most
speakers in Inner Circle locations, many Outer Circle residents cannot be said
to share a reasonably stable linguistic system broadly recognizable as English
with the rest of the population because they do not communicate with each
other extensively in that language and thus do not expose their children
primarily to input based on that shared system.
This fundamental distinction and its consequences for the nature and scope of
Outer varieties of English cannot be glossed over without encouraging misleading
perceptions of each sociolinguistic setting, often based on oxymoronic references
to non-native varieties (Singh, in Prendergast 1998), as well as unrealistic
expectations of the social and educational potential of English in Outer Circle
locations. Just as South African Indian English evolved in response to interac-
tions between Indian migrants and speakers of local languages as well as native
and non-native teachers of English (Mesthrie 1996), mainland Indian English
features substantial code-mixing between English and at least one local language
even in supposedly English-medium education, with lower socioeconomic groups
institutionally barred from access to English-medium schooling (Ramanathan
1999). At the syntactic level, it also exhibits substantial and systematic internal
variation between standard and vernacular usage (Bhatt 2000).
A further difculty is that by grouping together nation-states on the basis
of their shared colonial history at the expense of detailed sociolinguistic
analysis, the model fails to discriminate between strongly multiethnic entities
and strongly monolingual ones. For example, in strongly multilingual Nigeria,
Mauritius, or Singapore, English is widely used in a variety of ofcial and
unofcial roles not only for education, administration and for a few, at least
international communication but also for internal communication across

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ethnic groups. By contrast, despite having come under British administrative

control at approximately the same time, relatively monolingual Bangladesh or
Hong Kong have little need for English as a tool for internal communication
and tend to limit it to administrative and educational functions. As a result, the
model makes few useful predictions regarding prociency levels and commun-
icative practices in each location, a deciency that affects language educators
and language policy-makers working in these communities.

THE OUTER CIRCLE AND POSTCOLONIALISM

A second limitation of the Outer Circle concept is that it places at its core
nation-states born of the vagaries of (de)colonization and poorly reects local
sociolinguistic arrangements. Borrowing from Crystal (1997), for example,
Graddol (1997: 11) lists a total of 63 countries with non-native populations of
English speakers, a set of nations and territories of hugely different size and
geopolitical importance, ranging from 1-billion strong regional superpower
India to microscopic Nauru. Among the tinier nations, the Seychelles are listed
but the Maldives are not, perhaps reecting the fact that the former was a
crown colony and the latter a mere protectorate.
While this type of omission may seem relatively trivial and could easily be
remedied, a greater aw in the Outer Circle concept is that it encourages a
correlation between new varieties of English and locations where (mostly) British
colonial power left behind readily identiable creations in the form of inde-
pendent nation-states. This results in the model missing countries that became
part of a colonial empire only in disguise. One example among many is Egypt,
where British occupation began in 1882 and was reinforced at the close of World
War I when the country ofcially became a British protectorate, a situation
that lasted until 1952, longer in fact than the more transparent American
colonization of the Philippines. As Schaub (2000) shows, the British presence
in Egypt has had a major impact on educational practices to the point where
something like Egyptian English is common currency among professional and
service-oriented groups working in engineering, business, medicine, and the
tourist industry. One major difference is that, because the country is consider-
ably less multilingual than, say, India, English in Egypt does not normally
function as an interethnic lingua franca. However, its use among a professional
class that could in theory make do with Arabic makes the omission of a country
of such demographic and cultural importance from representations of the Outer
Circle model such as Crystal (1997) and Graddol (1997) somewhat puzzling.
Similarly, nations such as Jordan, Iraq, or (then) Palestine, over which
Britain had a brief mandate as they emerged from the disintegration of the
Turkish empire after World War I, or those countries created on the edge of
the Arabian peninsula in part to serve as administrative frameworks for oil
production such as Kuwait or Abu Dhabi, came under British inuence too late
to be colored red on maps of the empire. Yet, despite not being listed as Outer
Circle locations in sources such as Crystal (1997) or Graddol (1997), many of
these nations are seeing English evolving into a language of wider communication

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166 PAUL BRUTHIAUX

connecting a dominant local ethnic community to a vast multinational

immigrant labor force, in addition to playing an increasing role in education
at all levels.
Another group of signicantly English-speaking communities overlooked by
the model includes portions of countries whose regional components experienced
diverging colonial inuences but are now unitary nation-states. Cameroon, for
example, is acknowledged by Graddol (1997) as having in excess of 6 million
non-native speakers of English, mostly originating in the formerly German-
controlled western portion of the country that came under British control at the
end of World War I and was later joined to the larger French-controlled area to
form post-independence Cameroon. Yet, no such recognition is accorded to
Somaliland, the north-facing portion of Somalia that was a British protectorate
from 1884 to 1960 once again signicantly longer than the more familiar
American colonization of the Philippines at which point it was joined to a
greater Somalia. This ignores the fact that Somaliland has attempted since 1991
to have its de facto break with the formerly Italian-controlled southern portion
of the country recognized internationally (with little success so far) and lists
English along with Somali and Arabic as one of its three ofcial languages.
Another major country rarely discussed in relation to English worldwide
and the Three Circles model is Ethiopia, a strongly multiethnic country never
subjected to substantial interference by a dominant, English-speaking colonial
power and yet where English has long played a role as a prestige language, as
witnessed by Amharic-English code-switching patterns (Leyew 1998). Because it
appears to offer a neutral tool for internal interethnic communication as well as
rightly or wrongly a promise of modernization, English is currently being
promoted throughout the country as an alternative to Amharic not only in a
nationwide ofcial role but also as the medium of education, a prospect of
obvious interest to many non-Amharic-speaking Ethiopians (Ambatchew 1995;
Bloor 1996; Hameso 1997; Boothe and Walker 1997). In this sense, despite
substantially different patterns of European colonization, the current sociolin-
guistic interplay of Amharic, other local languages, and English in Ethiopia
recalls India, with its 50-year-old tussle between English and Hindi, the latter
promoted by a dominant group as a national language of wider communication
yet resisted by many non-Hindi speakers. In brief, a systematic focus on the
largely accidental outcome of political history obscures major sociolinguistic
similarities across former colonies and non-colonies alike and severely weakens
the descriptive and explanatory scope of the model.
Another case of English-speaking populations being treated differently by
the model on primarily historical rather than sociolinguistic grounds relates to
Central America. From Belize to Panama, the six Central American countries
with access to a Caribbean coastline all have substantial populations of English-
speaking descendents of relatively recent immigrants, mostly from Jamaica,
originally contracted to work on plantations as well as on related projects such
as railroad construction, and in Panama on the construction of the canal. Prior
to these relatively recent developments, however, links among British traders in

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Central American outposts and the key commercial hub of Jamaica were strong
enough for repeated calls to be made for British colonial status to be granted to
the entire Caribbean coast of Central America (Naylor 1989). Indeed, so strong
was the link between these populations and de facto British colonial power that
it was not until the 1948 revolution that the Jamaican residents of the Caribbean
coast of Costa Rica were granted Costa Rican citizenship and thus freed from
the need to turn to British consular authorities for protection and representation
(Harpelle 2001). Yet, only Belize (then British Honduras) succeeded in securing
ofcial British recognition as a crown colony, in part because relatively favorable
geography made the threat of direct control being imposed from neighboring
Guatemala more likely than in countries (especially along the Mosquito Coast of
Honduras and Nicaragua) where British trading presence was conned to isolated
estuary settlements largely inaccessible from the seat of Spanish-speaking power
in remote highlands. Today, despite the inroads made by Spanish into these
English-speaking communities in part as a result of the spread of primary
education, a degree of cultural afnity continues to link the coastal people of
these six nations across regional borders as well as with neighboring English-
speaking Caribbean islands (Harpelle 2001). Yet little of this intricate sociolin-
guistic pattern is captured by a model that maps varieties narrowly onto national
boundaries. Once again, only a focus on accidents of political history, not
sociolinguistic observation, explains why of all speakers of English in Central
America, only those in Belize are mentioned in most discussions of regional
varieties of the language and accorded Outer Circle status.
As for nearby Panama, its absence from classications such as Crystal (1997)
or Graddol (1997) is doubly puzzling in that, in addition to being home to many
English-speaking descendents of former plantation and canal laborers, this
American-inspired creation and the construction and administration of the canal
that justied it led to the growth of a bilingual administrative cadre of Spanish
speakers with its own localized variety of English as part of its communicative
repertoire. This should have predicted that the country would be accounted for
in much the same manner as Puerto Rico, the American Virgin Islands, or
American Samoa, all of which receive recognition in Crystals and Graddols
taxonomies. In brief, because it bases its coverage on political history (and
inconsistently, at that) as opposed to sociolinguistics, the concept of an
Outer Circle of new varieties of English is severely decient in the explanatory
and predictive power needed to account for the complex ecology of English
worldwide.

Limitations of the model: the Expanding Circle

The conceptual inconsistency that weakens the concepts of Inner and Outer
Circles of English worldwide is also apparent in discussions of the Expanding
Circle because it is not always clear whether the concept is meant to cover
countries, country-based varieties, speakers, or non- (or barely-) speaking

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168 PAUL BRUTHIAUX

learners. One consequence of this lack of clarity is that me-too calls are
heard periodically for additional varieties to be admitted to the ever-expanding
family of new Englishes. One such recent call comes from Shim (1999), who
argues that a long tradition of largely standardized English language teaching
and testing in Korea has resulted in an increasingly endonormative local standard
shared by all members of the teaching profession. On closer examination, such
periodic sightings of emerging varieties appear to have more in common with
corn circles than with sociolinguistic ones.
The question of what constitutes a variety of a language is a thorny one. The
key issue is whether there exists in a particular location a core of speakers who
not only know some English (e.g. Shims Korean teachers) but also use it to a
reasonable level of prociency for a substantial part of their daily activities,
whether for internal communication in a multiethnic society, for international
communication with other native or non-native speakers of the language, or for
academic purposes in a location where English plays a signicant role as a
medium of instruction despite not having a substantial presence locally. This is
fundamental because for a variety to emerge, local practices must surely gain
norm value through recurring, spontaneous use across a range of communicative
functions as well as in emblematic domains such as the media, artistic creation,
and popular culture. In other words, idiolects will converge as speakers accom-
modate to each other and gradually evolve a set of norms that most implicitly
recognize as a common bond. However, in countries where English is taught
widely but not used internally, the conditions for the emergence of such norms
are simply not in place. As a result, the kind of English spoken locally among a
narrow professional circle here, teachers no more constitutes the basis for a
variety of English than do restricted profession-based codes such as Airspeak,
the worldwide medium of air trafc control. One example of a restricted speech
form of this type is Thai English, which Smalley (1994) characterizes as
difcult for foreigners to understand and inadequate for communicative needs
beyond classroom practices. Although the increase in transnational communica-
tion across Europe has led to a well-documented claim for variety status to be
accorded to English used as a lingua franca (or ELF) by second language
speakers among themselves (Jenkins 2000; Seidlhofer 2001), the domain of such
language use remains restricted to specialized transactions (business negotiations,
industrial cooperation, tourism, etc.) by a relatively small number of speakers,
and broader variety-creating conditions remain largely absent.
Admittedly, allowance could be made for nations such as the Netherlands or
the Scandinavian countries where English is widely used in higher education. In
addition, the relatively small populations of these countries and their substantial
involvement in international trade mean that at any given time a relatively high
number of people will be involved in transnational communication in English,
and this may provide part of the necessary social platform for norms to develop.
In this sense, there may be a marginal case for speaking of Dutch English or
Norwegian English, though even this scenario is denied by Preisler with
respect to Denmark (in Afendras et al. 1995). If this is the case as regards a

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small country with such high and widespread prociency in English as Denmark,
it must apply all the more to much larger nations such as Brazil or China, say,
where those with some knowledge of English have even less motivation to speak
it to each other. Thus, the kind of English occasionally heard in Brazil or China
constitutes English with Brazilian or Chinese characteristics, not Brazilian
English or Chinese English. Interestingly, the point was made earlier by
Kachru himself (in Prendergast 1998) in the context of India, where the presence
of a few Indian speakers of Russian, he argues, does not lead to the emergence
of Indian Russian, because Russian is used exclusively as a foreign language
by very few with the limited goal of communicating with a small number of
native speakers of the language. In addition, there is no creativity in Russian to
speak of within India and therefore little or no systematic local adaptation of
Russian to the Indian context, hence no Indian contribution to any hypothetical
expanding circle of New Russians, as it were.
The difculty, as I argue above, is that the scope of the Expanding Circle
concept is generally left unspecied. In these locations, use of English reects in
part (legitimate) aspirations for a better future among educated, outward-
looking individuals, who see English as a modernizing force operating in con-
junction with other indicators of socioeconomic development such as increased
international trade. In Thailand, for example, a major function of English is to
symbolize being part of a wider, forward-looking world to the point where
commercial names of non-English origin associated with desirable consumer
products such as Este Lauder or Toyota are regarded as English by most
Thais (Smalley 1994). In some cases, the language can be pressed into service
by ofcials charged with presenting an up-to-date image of the country in highly
stage-managed formats. One revealing example of this practice is the Crazy
English phenomenon currently sweeping China and characterized by a blend
of exhortations borrowed in equal part from the quasi-evangelical discourse of
marketing and the Communist Party line (Bolton 2002). However, this creative
and uniquely Chinese linguistic product only represents the stylistic choices of a
handful of script writers, not the spontaneous practices of large numbers of
users that would need to occur in combination with other factors if a new
variety were to be identied.
Here too, the Three Circles model is at fault in that it makes no reference to
prociency and does not attempt to differentiate between degrees of communicat-
ive competence. In Expanding Circle locations, variation in prociency ranges
from native-like ability in a few to the kind of receptive, test-oriented knowledge
promoted through schooling, with many knowing no English at all. This vast
and unanalyzed variation in prociency across Inner, Outer, and Expanding
locations leads to unveriable claims regarding how many users may be said to
belong to each circle. Estimates offered by Crystal (1997) and reproduced by
Graddol (1997: 10) suggest a relatively narrow range for the Inner Circle
(320380 million). However, ranges for the Outer Circle (150300 million) and
especially the Expanding Circle (100 million-1 billion) are so broad as to be
largely meaningless. Little better are numbers based on self-reporting, as in the

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media study originally published in 1995, reported in Graddol (1997) and

reproduced in Yano (2001), improbably claiming that approximately 70% of
Europeans understand English well enough to follow TV news or read a news-
paper. Although this gure presumably includes a native-speaking British and
Irish component, no information is given in these reports as to the geographical
range of what is meant by Europe and especially whether this might include
Russia, a crucial factor in gaining a sense of the overall penetration of English
in that continent. Yet, gures of this type are frequently quoted in the mass
media to justify upbeat predictions of vast bilingual populations who will soon
be conducting local communication in a vernacular and international communica-
tion in English.
Pause for thought is in order when other gures appear to suggest that this
type of uently bilingual population still lies several generations into the future
and is in no way as widely distributed as Graddol and Yano blithely suggest. At
the opposite extreme of the spectrum lies another media-related study (Parker
1995), which implausibly claims that fewer than 3% of the residents of France,
Spain, and Italy reported having the kind of command of English that would
enable them to understand TV advertising in English, a gure that (equally
implausibly) does not rise much above 10% even in Scandinavia and the
Netherlands. Naturally, these data cannot easily be reconciled with Preislers
(1999) rather more subtle picture of English competence in Denmark, which
shows that while fully 80% of adult Danes report listening to English at least once
a day, only 9% report speaking it and a mere 4% report writing in it. Similarly,
while the number of adult Danes reporting little or no knowledge of English is
well below 5% for each age group below 50, the gure rises to around 20% for
those in the 5575 age group, an estimate Preisler regards as conservative.
Similar doubts regarding these conicting estimates arise from the publication
of strongly diverging estimates of the number of English speakers in Hungary
(Kontra 2001; Petzold and Berns 2001). Given the fuzziness of the numbers, it
is perhaps not surprising that some extrapolations border on the fanciful. Yano
(2001), for example, makes the improbable claim that as the number of second
language speakers of English comes to exceed that of native speakers, the center
of authority regarding linguistic norms and practices will shift from the latter to
the former, as if geopolitical and economic factors did not matter. Just as
unsustainable is Yanos further prediction that EFL varieties of English may
one day emerge and converge into Euro-English, African-English, or Asian-
English, as if the vast cultural differences characterizing entire continents
were of no consequence.
A further reason for questioning the appropriateness of the Expanding Circle
concept is that there is no reason why a model of English worldwide should
not capture other cases of languages of wider communication. Although the
position of English as the tool of choice for worldwide communication is
probably unassailable (de Swaan 1998), English is by no means unique in
fullling interethnic and transnational communicative functions. Thus, to
gain in explanatory power, a model of English worldwide would have to be

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 SQUARING THE CIRCLES 171

capable of accounting for the comparable operation of other languages of wider

communication. If we are to follow Shims (1999) approach and announce a
New English wherever we nd it taught extensively as a foreign language
but spoken by a small minority and rarely or never for purposes of internal
communication, there is no reason not to extend the favor to other languages,
and the resulting sociolinguistic picture begins to look very odd indeed.
Despite a more restricted geographical distribution, the role of French as an
international language, for example, parallels that of English to a remarkable
degree. French remains widely used as a language of wider communication
within and across borders in a range of former colonial locations, mostly in
Africa. It continues to enjoy (occasionally grudging or cosmetic) recognition in
supranational bodies such as the European Union (EU). Despite the fact that it
has been losing ground among students of a second language to English in
Europe but also to Spanish in the USA and to Japanese in Australia it retains
a degree of popularity that French institutions do their best to bolster. In the
UK, for example, it is by far the preferred choice of a second language at
secondary school and university level. Though relatively few reach a signicant
degree of communicative competence in the language as a result of studying it in
the classroom, some clearly do, and this can be turned into an asset in Europe-
wide business, in dealing with EU institutions, traveling for leisure, or simply
enjoying an overall interest in things French. Given that this situation in
relation to learners of French mirrors that of millions of learners of English as
a second language worldwide, there is a need to decide what an expanding or,
in this case perhaps, a contracting circle of New Frenches might encompass.
Viewing the concept as covering the many locations where French is studied
as a second language but rarely if ever spoken has descriptive but not
explanatory value. Taking as the central conceptual unit a set of speakers with
competence ranging from native-like to non-existent has neither descriptive
nor explanatory value since the components of the set that is, the speakers
and the prociency levels that characterize them are not comparable. Finally,
viewing the model as a set of new varieties dened on the basis of linguistic
practices among professional groups such as language teachers, as Shim (1999)
suggests with reference to English in Korea, leads to a theoretical dead end. To
be sure, there is a strong case for studying the transplanted Koreans in
China, Brazil, and Kazakhstan, or the Frenches in Senegal, Madagascar, and
Tahiti. However, if classroom practices are a sufcient criterion for identifying
a variety of a language, if Korean English then why not British French,
and because French is presumably studied by someone somewhere in Korea,
why not Korean French too? And so on, potentially ad absurdum.

Abuses and uses of models of English worldwide

I have argued that the Three Circles model has made a valuable contribution
to our appreciation of contexts for English worldwide beyond those varieties

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172 PAUL BRUTHIAUX

traditionally recognized as norm-giving. If the aim of the Kachru enterprise

was primarily to help shift negative perceptions in some quarters and bolster
linguistic self-condence in others, it has been an undeniable success. Related
or not, clear signs of this shift are visible in the best-selling literature now
produced outside conventional, norm-giving settings. As Thumboo (2001: 386)
puts it, what had been achieved by writers of New Englishes is no less than

the act of writing ourselves into the language, English, coloring it with the content,
the referential range of our history and experience, and so, possess it. And write
our-selves out of the British Empire. And write ourselves into a dening prole, an
identity that is simultaneously a sense of being restored as a sovereign people, through
constructing a liberating literature in English. A literature that draws from the other
half of the hyphen, the one rooted in our various cultures.

In this sense, the evolution of New Englishes closely parallels the success of
American English in gaining acceptance as a legitimate tool for the expression of
localized cultural experiences, a process that took many decades to unfold and
(incidentally) was long resisted within the USA itself, as witnessed by the ban on
lectures being delivered at Yale in American English, a ruling not lifted until
1929 (Singh 1996).
To sum up, the Three Circles model struggles with the problem of attempting
to account for phenomena that are not strictly comparable. Minimally, the
model refers to sets of locations. Provided we are prepared to ignore mists
such as South Africa along with signicant populations of speakers of non-
standard varieties of English (Mexican-American English in the USA, Jamaican
English in the UK, etc.), the Inner Circle concept more or less coherently
describes locations where the language has long been sustained by relatively
stable English-speaking majorities. For its part, the Outer Circle concept is
based largely in political history in that it represents locations where English
was transplanted within colonial structures that touched multilingual populations
to vastly different degrees. By contrast, the Expanding Circle covers a set of
countries where English is widely taught as a second language while being no
ones primary language. At some basic descriptive level, the model is adequate
enough in that, provided it is not required to account for complex sociolinguistic
phenomena, it offers a useful shorthand for classifying contexts of English world-
wide. At a more sophisticated level, however, a framework based in history and
its geographical legacy cannot accommodate discussions of complex notions such
as language varieties. In other words, the Three Circles concept is a nation-
based model that draws on historical events which only partially correlate with
current sociolinguistic data, an inherent lack of theoretical consistency that
goes back to Kachrus early articulation of the model (1984) through later
renements (1985, 1989). The result of this ambivalence regarding the nature
and scope of the model varieties, countries, speakers, or all three? is that
any explanatory power is lost as the analysis shifts from circle to circle.
To be sure, no model of a complex phenomenon such as language variation
can hope to account for every local twist in the sociolinguistic plot. However, the

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 SQUARING THE CIRCLES 173

valorization of traditionally denigrated or overlooked linguistic practices need

not be incompatible with the aim of capturing the complexities of evolving
sociolinguistic settings aided by principled linguistic analysis. Nor is it being
claimed that the structures left behind by colonial history are of no consequence.
As Kaplan and Baldauf (1997) argue, language planning and policy should be
based in a broadly ecological view of language and the exible concept of polity.
That is, for purposes of language analysis and planning, a polity may map onto
national borders (e.g. largely monolingual Japan), or it may encompass more
than one nation-state (e.g. contiguous Chad and Niger), or it may be limited
to a specic administrative unit within a country (e.g. Qubec) or to specic
communities within that unit (e.g. the indigenous nations of Qubec). In the
cases of large, sociolinguistically complex countries such as Canada, the USA,
Russia, or India, any attempt to classify populations as a single polity is likely
to be fruitless. Much the same case for an ecological as opposed to a nation-
based approach to language policy and planning is made by Mhlhusler (2000).
To be sure, the power of the modern nation-state is such that most language
planning tends to take place within national borders, with sharp divisions
sometimes forced upon populations split by articial borders (e.g. the Wolof
speakers on either side of the francophoneanglophone SenegalGambia
border). However, a largely nation-based model makes the task of factoring in
sociolinguistic variables much more difcult and is likely to lead to precisely the
types of descriptive tangles and oversimplications outlined above.
Periodically, suggestions surface for modications to be made to the Three
Circles model. By visualizing the model as consisting of overlapping rather than
concentric circles, some sources such as Graddol (1997) attempt to represent
the partial commonalities of its components but without making it any clearer
whether these commonalities are to be found in countries, speakers, or varieties.
Yano (2001) suggests partly blurring the distinction between the Inner and
Outer circles, thereby shifting the focus of analysis from countries and varieties
to speakers. He proposes that speakers in both sets should be regarded as, in
effect, speaking English natively and thus labeled ENL speakers, with further
sub-labeling of Inner Circle speakers as having genetic competence and those
in the Outer Circle as having functional competence. However, this approach
has two major drawbacks. First, the suggestion that genetics is somehow involved
has the potential for allowing misinterpretations that may be accidental in the
case of the less informed or deliberate in the case of the more manipulative, as
the more demagogic aspects of the recent Ebonics controversy amply demonstrate
(Lippi-Green 1997; Collins 1999). Second, the approach appears to imply that
all Outer Circle speakers have native-like competence (an obviously unsustainable
characterization) and thus ignores the issue of what might constitute native
competence and how it might be measured (for a far-ranging discussion of
this problematic issue, see Singh et al. 1995). In brief, proposals of this type
essentially continue to take the nation-state as their conceptual starting point
and struggle with the conceptual fuzziness inherent in what is essentially a 20th
century construct. A 21st century alternative, I suggest, is called for.

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174 PAUL BRUTHIAUX

First, however, it is necessary to consider why a model of English worldwide

is needed at all since it could be objected that all models are reductionist
at heart and only lead to unjustiable reication, misleading categorization,
stereotyping, and oversimplication. Apart from the obvious response that any
process of cognition is inevitably one of modeling, the principal justication for
persevering with the search for a suitable model is that analysts will inevitably
be required to go beyond noting the inherent fuzziness of any patterns in their
raw materials and will sooner or later be faced with the awkward but inevitable
rationalization implied in presenting their ndings in a didactically adequate
manner. In addition, applied linguists and language policy specialists in par-
ticular will need to be prepared to represent broad trends and make recom-
mendations to policy makers with limited background knowledge or time to
acquire it under pressure before having to make decisions that will affect the
lives of entire populations and typically involve large amounts of public funds.
Under these conditions, admissions of the intractability of fuzzy borders are no
substitute for workable policy advice. If a degree of reductionism has to affect
the presentation and application of sociolinguistic data, this is a small price to
pay for the privilege of doing socially useful sociolinguistics.
How, in the circumstances, can a model be made to meet high standards
of analytical rigor while retaining sufcient clarity to meet pedagogical and
other practical needs that are bound to pull it in the direction of relative
simplication? The response, I suggest, must involve substantial rethinking of
the familiar paradigm through which our perceptions of English worldwide
have been ltered for the past few decades. Firstly, we need to acknowledge
that while the Three Circles model has provided us with a convenient shorthand
for labeling contexts of English worldwide, the categories that the model created
have also had the unfortunate side-effect of reifying the content of these categories
and of encouraging the notion that Englishes are Englishes, regardless of circle.
In some cases, major commonalities will of course be found across circles, as in
a common role for the language in administration, education, or artistic creation
in both Inner and Outer locations. Overall, however, variation exists across
each of the three types in key features such as dialectal range in Inner locations,
prociency range in Outer locations, or severely limited functional range in
Expanding locations. It is this type of variation that an alternative model must
attempt to represent.
While any outline of an alternative model of English worldwide remains
sketchy at this stage, some guiding principles are clear. At the practical level, the
model should strike a balance between being truthful to the complexities of each
sociolinguistic setting and able to be readily grasped by policy makers charged
with making informed decisions affecting language use and language education
without benet of an extensive background in sociolinguistics. At the theoretical
level, an alternative model must refrain from labeling varieties of English on the
basis of largely non-linguistic factors such as political boundaries. Instead, it
should focus on coherent communities of speakers and the relatively tangible set
of variables that makes them the kind of language users that they are. It should

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 SQUARING THE CIRCLES 175

be parsimonious and only represent non-correlating sociolinguistic dimensions

for specic sets of speakers. In brief, the model should make it possible to
represent speech practices based on patterns of interaction and communicative,
not historical, factors and take as its premise the notion that shared linguistic
knowledge and practices are generally of greater communicative consequence
than national origin. This is not to suggest that an understanding of sociopolitical
factors such as colonial history is not crucial if we are to make sense of the
nature and role of languages of interethnic and transnational communication.
However, much is to be gained by focusing less on where speakers of English
come from and more on what they do or dont do with the language.
In brief, fresh thinking on modeling contexts for English worldwide will
require that we loosen the current connection between political history and
sociolinguistics and that we comprehensively account for each context wherever
it is found. To do this, it may be necessary to step out of the very notions of
Inner versus Outer Circles because the distinction reies a historical view of the
spread of English. Ultimately, the sense of segregation that is at the heart of the
circles metaphor is counterproductive, for two reasons. Firstly, any attempt to
make a model predict types of English on the basis of little more than geography
will lead to oversimplication, as in the temptation to identify nascent varieties
of English in locations of the Expanding type where the language is studied but
barely spoken. Better, I suggest, to base a model of English worldwide on a
sociolinguistic description of contexts for the language than to see it primarily
as promotion for selected varieties less liberation and more linguistics, as it
were. Secondly, persisting with the Three Circles model makes it less likely that
all manifestations of English wherever they occur will eventually be seen as
qualitatively comparable and equally valid. Potentially, any variety of English
is capable of extending its functional range to the point where it becomes at rst
tolerated, then accepted, and nally recognized as a prestige variety, in its local
domain and internationally. American English, after all, went from Outer to
Inner status in the space of a few decades. Although all currently denigrated
varieties have the potential for eventually achieving comparable status, stamping
these varieties in indelible ink with the label Outer can only retard their
coming of age. For our understanding of the contexts of English worldwide
to deepen and progress, each context needs to be examined in its own right
rather than in reference to increasingly obsolete and in any case descriptively
inadequate categorizations. As incomplete, unfair, and outdated characteriza-
tions of varieties of English fade away, thanks in part to the Three Circles
model, so ultimately must the model itself.

Acknowledgement

I am grateful to Rakesh Bhatt, Jennifer Jenkins, Robert B. Kaplan, Bent Preisler,

Edgar Schneider, and Rajendra Singh for valuable comments on earlier drafts. All views
expressed here are my own.

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176 PAUL BRUTHIAUX

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[Received 7/9/02; revised 15/1/03]

Paul Bruthiaux
Department of English
Texas A&M University
College Station, Texas 77843
USA
e-mail: bruthiaux@english.tamu.edu

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